Not true.
If you are white and you think that racism was invented by Obama, then you are unlikely to see how they have historically gone hand in hand.
Watch the video, y’all.
An African American man who was out birdwatching, and who “threatened” her by giving her dog some treats. What a monster!
This is the wrong thread for this. After all, the woman opens her apology with, “I am not a racist.” So there MUST be some other explanation. Damned if I know what it is, but there’s gotta be!
Meanwhile, though, let’s focus on that guy. He confronts people whose dogs are off-leash because it helps the birds he loves, and his way of dealing with the “scofflaws” (his word) is to feed treats to their dogs until they get uncomfortable and put their dogs on leashes.
Could this guy be any more of a hero? I mean, he’s like a character from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Holy shit! “I’m being threatened by a black man, please send the cops immediately!” She could easily get him killed that way. What a fucking entitled racist asshole.
Actually, I think a more accurate summary would be:
White woman (Amy Cooper) apologizes after her life was upended when the public saw a video of her calling police on a black man and saying “There’s an African American man threatening my life.”
She’s not really apologizing for her actions; she’s in desperate damage-control mode. You just know that, if there were no video of this incident, she’d probably be describing to all her friends how she barely escaped a dangerous encounter in the woods in Central Park.
Amy Cooper, dog strangler.
The in-house racists will stop by shortly to explain how threatening African American birdwatchers can be.
And, yeah, she was a threat to both man and dog. The dog is back with the rescue organization where she got him.
I would have no problem if she was charged with attempted murder.
Let’s say the police did take her call seriously and Mr. Birdwatcher caught a bullet in the process. Wouldn’t she have some responsibility for that?
I know people hate that lives can be “ruined” over viral videos. But when a person like this shitty individual doesn’t face any legal consequences, the door is left open for the angry mob to mete out its own. If we start throwing the book at assholes like her, maybe viral videos will lose their power.
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I completely get where you’re coming from, but one problem with this formulation is that it risks creating the impression that the police are not responsible for their actions once they arrive.
Yes, this woman is a fucking menace and a disgrace, but we as a society also have the right to expect that our law enforcement officers will use good judgment in responding to situations like this. To be honest, if we could rely on police to act in a calm and rational and non-racist manner, then calls like this wouldn’t be a problem, because we could trust that the cops would show up, recognize that the guy poses no threat, and hand the woman a good verbal smackdown about what is and is not the proper use of 911.
I think that what really gets me, in this particular case, is that this woman clearly knew that her actions could have adverse consequences for the guy, precisely because he was black. Why else would she say to him, before calling the police, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life”? She explicitly and intentionally deployed the issue of race, and the trope of the threatening black man, to make her point. She knew, or believed, that making such a claim might result in a disproportionate and violent police response, and she did it anyway, to a man who was behaving calmly and reasonably, and was not at all threatening.
In cases like this, as long as no-one commits a criminal act of stalking or violence against her, I have no problem at all with her suffering the public consequences of her actions. She brought them all on herself.
On the one hand, I’d be quite happy to see people like this charged with an improper use of 911, just like people who call 911 because they got the wrong pizza, or because their stylist messed up their haircut. A case like this seems like a clear-cut misuse of the emergency service.
On the other hand, you want to leave room for grey-area cases, and you don’t want to discourage people from calling 911 if they genuinely feel that there’s an emergency. It’s a tough balance, and in a case like this, hopefully the social and economic consequences will be sufficient to act as an example and a deterrent.
There used to be no social consequences (much less any other type of consequences) for this kind of awfulness. Now the social consequences can sometimes be pretty severe. Hopefully that will sink into the white consciousness that bullshit 911 calls on black people living their lives could seriously harm their lives. Hasn’t enough yet, though.
Yes, to all of this. She could do what she did because of the profoundly racist nature of policing. And she knew it–she told him what she was going to do before she did it, and she became increasingly frantic once on the phone as if she were actually being attacked.
The in-house racist commentators in my local paper have already chimed in with their assurances that the man could not have been birdwatching because “Those people don’t do that”
Racist fucks.
Another fucking racist.
Firstly she only got suspended from her job, so, slap on the wrist really. I have NO issue with such people getting the consequences of their actions in full measure.
Every time you see such a scenario unfold, remind yourself, she had the choice to think again, to restrain herself, as soon as a camera appeared. Thereby escaping any consequence of any racist or ugly thing she may have done prior to the camera appearing.
When they see the camera, they ALL have a golden opportunity to turn things around or just straight STOP !
But they NEVER do. Because they are that CERTAIN of their privilege. She honestly believed saying a black man threatened her life was enough to get him taken away!
If you can’t restrain your racist self even when the camera is on you, you deserve what you get for being extra stupid on top of being racist!
She’ll likely be fired. I expect the firm needs to get the lawyers lined up first.
I feel this comment so much.
Maybe the first twenty times you hear about some asshole getting fucked over for what they did in a viral video, it isn’t insane to have sympathy for them. But I don’t have any more sympathy for people like this. I can’t be arsed to care about their “ruined” lives, not when we live in a universe where actual saints can have their lives ruined for no reason at all. If she winds up getting fired and losing her apartment and having to move back to the bumfuck she came from, good!! Maybe now a much better person will have an opportunity they wouldn’t have otherwise had. Maybe another psychopath will think twice between weaponizing their white female tears.
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She wasn’t even remotely afraid and the tears weren’t real. At the beginning of the video she marches right up to him and he has to tell her to stay back.
She was punishing him, pure and simple, for being a black man in what she clearly viewed was a white space.
It’s not common but yes, those people do do that. And they get shit for “birding while black” too, unsurprisingly.
ETA: It appears to be very uncommon indeed: Googling “black birdwatchers” brings up several articles from several years but all are about the same guy (J Drew Lanham).
It’s always useful to remind these racists that they’re not normal. They should constantly be shown that the rest of us don’t secretly agree with them and weren’t not cheering them on.
Maybe we can’t stop racists from being racists. But we can make them ashamed to be racists and make them hide it.